Engineering Robots in the Integrated Design Challenge

The IDC Set Up

The IDC is an introductory lab in the ECE curriculum that also draws many other engineering and computer science students. Students learn about bread boarding, wiring, circuit design and power management with some coding mixed in. Students come with varying levels of experience, but most are seeing these concepts for the first time.

The IDC is designed like a game that challenges lab sections to earn the highest score. For this semester, each lab section split into five groups to build five robots.

The specifics of each semester’s IDC varies, but the basic premise stays the same: All robots are meant to follow a path on a large game board, detect objects with sensors, transmit and receive data, display data on a digital screen, and coordinate a “celebration” action with each other. The class is collectively assessed on the five robots’ ability to correctly perform different tasks over five trials.

“This lab scratches the surface of the ECE academic curricular groups and prepares students to dive into their core ECE courses,” Davidson said. “And we get a lot of biomedical engineering (BME) students, too, because a lot of their higher-level courses also involve the same concepts.”

Tyler King, a senior BME student, participated in the IDC during his sophomore spring semester.

“The first week when we did line following, I was so astounded that the bots were able to follow the lines,” King said. “The idea of sensors carries forward for a lot of classes. We think about how to convert the physical world into something a computer can read.”

Since then, King led lab sections as a TA for three semesters. The section he led last fall received a perfect score—a first in the three years Davidson has taught the class. This semester, King became head TA and tweaked the IDC parameters with the student experience in mind.   

“As a student, it was just one bot, one sensor,” King said. “As a TA, you step back and think about, ‘What do we want students to get out of the exercise?’ Moving to head TA is the same kind of shift thinking about, ‘How do I get the TAs to ask the right questions and guide students to think about electronics and sensors?’”